Question

When used with .Net Framework 2.0 it looks like the OEM encoding isn’t available in PowerShell.

PS1> Get-Content $FilePath -Encoding OEM

Cannot bind parameter ‘Encoding’. Cannot convert value “OEM” to type “Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.FileSystemCmdletProviderEncoding” due to invalid enumeration values. Specify one of the following enumeration values and try again. The possible enumeration values are “Unknown, String, Unicode, Byte, BigEndianUnicode, UTF8, UTF7, Ascii”.

However I have files in this encoding that I’d like to read in a string, how to do it?

Answer 1

Read in a binary array and decode it :

$enc = [System.Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding($Host.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.OEMCodePage)
$bytes = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes($FilePath)
$text = $enc.GetString($bytes)